Montaigne

This article reads Simmel's and Lacan's respective theories of subject and object with regard to their understandings of alienation as a constant human feature. It demonstrates a gradual shift in their work from a conception of humans as autonomous subjects to humans as free individuals. It argues that this shift is best understood with regard to their respective contentions with alienation and in relation of transgression.     

Pierre Manent's Montaigne

Pierre Manent's Montaigne: la vie sans loi is at once a profound reading of Michel de Montaigne's notoriously elusive Essays and an ambitious effort to reshape our understanding of the meaning of modernity. Manent argues that Montaigne brings a distinctively modern conception of life itself into being in his writing, a conception now so pervasive that its novelty is difficult for us to discern. He makes a compelling case for according Montaigne a central place in any modern attempt at self-understanding, but also shows that the modern self-conception Montaigne helped bring into being is highly questionable.     

Montaigne,Tocqueville, and the Politics of Skepticism

Abstract

Shakespeare shows how enforceable contract not only undergirds the city of Venice, which makes a multicultural society possible, but its corrosive effects on non-contractual relationships like friendship, love, and marriage. This is evident in the decisions, actions, and relationships of Antonio, Bassanio, Portia, and Jessica. Although Shakespeare concludes the play on a happy note, the conclusion one can reach is that, despite its advantages, regimes based on commerce and contract fail to create the conditions for friendship, love, and marriage to flourish.     

Thinking with Montaigne: evidence, scepticism and meaning in early modern demonology

In 1612 the Bordeaux witchcraft inquisitor Pierre de Lancre (1556–1631), himself linked by marriage to Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592), revealed that the essayist and sceptic was related on his mother’s side to a leading authority on magic and superstition, the Flemish-Spanish Jesuit Martin Delrio (1551–1608). De Lancre confounded historians' expectations by using the revelation to defend Montaigne against his cousin's criticism. This article re-evaluates the relationships of De Lancre, Delrio and Montaigne in the light of recent scholarship, which casts demonology as a form of "resistance to scepticism" that conceals deep anxiety about the existence of the supernatural. It explores De Lancre’s and Delrio’s very different attitudes towards Montaigne and towards evidence and scepticism. This, in turn, reveals the different underlying preoccupations of their witchcraft treatises. It hence argues that no monocausal explanation linking scepticism to witchcraft belief is plausible.